Photo by David Brendan Hall • Design by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images (imitating original book cover art by Michelle “Michu” Benaim)
The seeds of Alejandro Puyana’s debut novel, Freedom Is a Feast, were first planted in 2012 with a phone call. On the other end of the line, his parents in Caracas, Venezuela, told him that his brother, Manuel, was going to be OK. Manuel had been kidnapped and was being held hostage, but police had surrounded the house, and the situation was under control.
The kidnapping had begun as a house robbery, common across Venezuela. Four men – not much more than boys, really – had planned to burst into the house and quickly make away with anything of value they could carry. But someone had seen them enter and called the police. Manuel and his friend were caught inside with the assailants as police swarmed the area. The only options for the criminals were to give themselves up or die trying to escape.
It wasn’t the first time Manuel had been kidnapped. Eight years before, when he was 16, he was abducted outside of the family’s residential building when several men stole his car as he was returning home from the corner store. The building’s security officers witnessed the abduction and called up to the family’s home.
“My parents were actually on an airplane, so they didn’t know that it was happening,” Puyana recalls. “I was in my early 20s and alone at the house, so I was just terrified. And [Manuel] was just a kid. We made calls, and the neighbors came down; we called the police, so there were basically 25 people in my house while my parents were on a plane.”
Manuel returned a couple of hours later. The carjackers had realized how young he was and gotten scared, so they put him in a taxi home. He was beat up and bruised, but otherwise safe.
“A lot of that stuff I don’t even remember because it was so traumatic,” Puyana says. “I just remember hugging my brother. Everything before the hug is kind of just really, really muddy.”
Eight years later, and 2,000 miles away in Austin, Puyana hung on the phone hoping for his brother to once more return home safely. When it was over and the men had turned themselves in, he talked to his brother, who told him about the ordeal. Inside the house, Manuel had talked to his captors, trying to calm them down and convince them to surrender.
“There was one guy in my brother’s kidnapping that was really sort of both infuriating and fascinating, all at the same time,” Puyana relates. “The guy is crying, remorseful. He had never done anything like this before. The relationship between my brother and that kidnapper, it was such an intense story. There were so many questions that I had about him. That’s the part of the story that kind of stuck with me. The writerly instinct was that I wanted to know about him and just see if I could understand and figure out why he had done it.”
The episode of that kidnapping became a central scene in Puyana’s novel. It was the first part of the book that he wrote, and that question of trying to understand the young man, crying in the corner as he held his brother captive with the police outside, eventually spun into a much wider story, one of a family torn apart by poverty, a country brutally worn down by dictatorship, and the lives caught in the collision of politics, social collapse, and personal longing that has become the modern history of Venezuela.
“When my brother got kidnapped, that really threw me into a kind of a tailspin,” Puyana says. “I really wanted to go back to Venezuela at that time. It felt really bad that I was here and my parents and my brother were still in Venezuela, and it was a really heated moment politically in the country. That’s when I started writing about Venezuela more seriously.
“I just felt so overwhelmed being so far away,” he admits. “Writing about it was really helpful. I wasn’t writing it because I wanted other people to understand Venezuela better or wanted other people to read about Venezuela. It was really just a way that I was kind of processing my own thoughts about it. I think it was the way that I was coping.”
Sitting at a picnic table outside of CACHITOS512, Puyana lays out a spread of various trays from the Venezuelan food truck. The tequeños and cachapa ooze cheese while the arepas overflow with fillings of reina pepiada.
As the title suggests, food plays a central role in Freedom Is a Feast. Whether in the barrios of Caracas, the jungles along the northern coast, or the prisons in the south of Venezuela, food serves as the cultural touchstone in the novel that brings people together in a country otherwise rent apart.
The humble cuisine has also become a hallmark of the Venezuelan diaspora around the world, as an estimated 7.7 million citizens have fled the country’s repression, poverty, and crime since 2015.
“Outside of Venezuela, the arepa is flourishing. That is what happens when an authoritarian regime forces anywhere from 6 percent to 9 percent of a country’s population to leave,” wrote Puyana in a 2017 essay for NPR titled “Arepas Are Conquering the World.” “But that is no consolation for the millions of Venezuelans who are struggling to feed themselves, who have to stand in line for hours to get their price-regulated bag of Harina P.A.N. or haggle in the black market and spend many times the official cost.”
At 43 years old, Puyana’s boyish face belies his age, betrayed only by the sparks of gray that streak across the sides of his slicked-back hair. Tucked into his shorts, he’s sporting a pinstriped Caracas Lions baseball jersey, his favorite team growing up in the city.
It’s a week before the Venezuelan presidential elections, and the opposition has coalesced behind Edmundo González in the biggest threat yet to Nicolás Maduro’s regime. Puyana is presciently pessimistic about the outcome, fearing that Maduro will suppress the vote and refuse to recognize the results regardless of turnout.
Alejandro Puyana at home (Photo by David Brendan Hall)
Venezuela’s is a complicated, and heartbreaking, history. Once a bastion of opportunity in South America, the country provided haven to European immigrants fleeing the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and later millions of neighboring Colombians seeking refuge in the 1970s and Eighties. Propped up by the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela boomed, alongside corruption and disparity. When oil prices cratered, so did the country’s economy.
Hugo Chávez swept into power in 1999 behind a wave of populist support for his socialist agenda, and quickly concentrated that power into an authoritarian regime that continues today under his successor, Maduro.
“I remember when Chávez came to power, there were some voices saying, ‘We’re going to become Cuba. We’re fucked,’” recalls Puyana. “Most people would say back to that, ‘We’re not going to become Cuba; we’re a democratic country. We’ve got oil. It’s fine. We’ll survive this.’ Twenty years later, you have people lining up in supermarkets losing crazy amounts of weight because they couldn’t find food, parents that were starving because all they could afford was to feed their kids. All of that stuff happened in Venezuela, and now millions of people are crossing the border to try to find something else.”
Freedom Is a Feast opens amid the chaos of 2002’s failed coup against Chávez, with a mother racing through the streets of Caracas to save her son against a backdrop of violent protests and government crackdown. The personal and the political inexorably intertwine throughout the novel, which stretches back to the rise of the leftist movement in the 1960s, through its Chávez-led betrayal at the turn of the century, and into the contemporary crisis that has crippled Venezuela into poverty and desperation.
The characters Puyana created confront the contours of that desperation with a vivid and poignant resilience. From the student revolutionary-turned-weary newspaper editor Stanislavo and his defiant lover Emiliana – who chooses family over political ideals – to the struggling yet stalwart Maria and her ill-fated son Eloy, the characters are caught in intractable circumstances and impossible choices.
“I think the way that I picture it, and the way that it certainly came about in the book, is that life in Venezuela is political,” offers Puyana. “Every decision that the characters make is in some way influenced by the political world they live in, and it’s inescapable to them as is the class difference and the ideological differences.
“I tried my best to write in a way that the humanity in the book is there regardless of your interest in Venezuelan politics or Venezuela as a nation,” he continues. “But for Venezuelans reading this, they know everything that happened. They know the weight of these things because they’ve lived them.”
Puyana readily recognizes his own privilege in even being able to write a story about his homeland. His father was a successful businessman in Venezuela, and Puyana’s upper-middle-class upbringing in Caracas afforded more security and opportunity than he witnessed across the rest of the city.
The oldest of three children, Puyana and his sister were both born while his father held an internship at a bank in New York City, allowing them dual citizenship in the United States. After graduating college in Venezuela with a degree in sociology, he moved to Austin in 2006 at age 26 to pursue a master’s degree in advertising at UT. He originally planned to stay only a few years and then move back to Venezuela.
Puyana looks through photos of his family’s time in Venezuela (Photo by David Brendan Hall)
“[While pursuing] my advertising master’s, I took my first creative writing class as an elective,” he says. “I had started writing some short stories when I was in Venezuela when I was in college, kind of really bad imitations of Julio Cortázar and other people that I liked, so when I had a chance to do a writing workshop, I tried it out. I really loved it enough that after that class ended, I found a writing group on the neighborhood listserv for Hyde Park where we would go in and discuss our work.”
After graduate school, Puyana took a job working with Message, Audience & Presentation (MAP), a local political communications agency focused on Latiné outreach for Democratic candidates and progressive causes. Meanwhile back home, his family continued to fight against Chavismo. His brother participated in student protests, and his father helped found TalCual, a newspaper critical of the ruling regime. The paper’s editor, Teodoro Petkoff, would become an inspiration for Stanislavo in Puyana’s novel.
His brother’s second kidnapping in 2012 changed their lives, however. For Puyana, his writing turned toward his homeland, grappling with the feelings of guilt, anger, frustration, and longing that only an expat can know.
“By that time, the regime had shifted and it was pretty authoritarian,” he recalls. “There was a lot of repression of marchers, and students were being jailed. There were rumors of students being tortured, so things had turned really dark. My parents were like, ‘No, don’t come back. We’re fine. It’s gonna be fine. You’re building your life over there.’
“My brother became really jaded because of all these experiences,” he continues. “For so long, he was so adamant about fighting for Venezuela, about not leaving, and being really involved. I just remember him being so much more lighthearted and a guy that could relate to everyone and really connect with people. I don’t know if he would agree with this, but I feel like a few years after that trauma, he kind of just washed his hands of the country. I know that’s not entirely how he feels, but I think part of him doesn’t want to go back there.”
Puyana started a company in Austin with his father and brother, leveraging their experience in the construction industry to build houses in the city. It also allowed them to receive work visas in the United States. His entire family now lives in the U.S., with his sister in California and the rest in Austin with Puyana, his wife Brittani Sonnenberg, and their 1-year-old daughter, Ona. His mother earned her citizenship this past year.
“Austin was becoming this hub of family, and my dad really missed that a lot,” he reflects on his parents finally leaving the country. “That was one of the beautiful things about growing up in Caracas – all of our family was there. We saw our cousins and our aunts and uncles, and we all lived close. Every Sunday was a family gathering. I think my dad saw in Austin an opportunity to build that again.”
While his family slowly immigrated to the United States, Puyana continued to focus his writing on Venezuela. After applying to UT’s renowned Michener Center for Writers three times, he was finally accepted to the program in 2019. Working with writers like Bret Anthony Johnston, Elizabeth McCracken, and Amy Hempel, his writing began to delve poignantly into both the beauty and brutality of his homeland. His story “The Hands of Dirty Children” won American Short Fiction’s Halifax Ranch Prize and was included in the 2020 Best American Short Stories anthology.
As Freedom Is a Feast marks its publication this week in the U.S., the streets of Venezuela are once again flooded in protest and violence. Maduro declared victory in the election despite evidence of the opposition’s overwhelming vote. Already thousands have been detained and dozens killed in the protests, with the U.S. and other democracies recognizing González as the rightful winner.
“I’ve chatted with a couple of my friends that are still there, and thankfully everyone in my immediate circle has been okay,” Puyana says a week after the election. “But it’s been pretty tough, and the numbers of people that have been taken by the government forces has been pretty scary.
“There was an overwhelming feeling of hope the day of the election, because so many people have come out in droves to support a change. But after the government took over and denied the results, it was really just a sense of dread that they were doing it, and also anger. There is still a strong belief in the opposition leaders, and I think the movement is trying to tell people that the tumbling of a dictatorship takes time and effort, but I think people are starting to lose hope and bracing for the possibility that this government just becomes even more insular, even more extreme.”
Puyana in his Caracas Lions jersey (Photo by David Brendan Hall)
Much like the characters in his novel, Puyana remains torn between a necessary hope that change can come to Venezuela and a resignation of the country’s harsh reality. He hasn’t returned to Venezuela since 2016 and doesn’t know when he might see his homeland again.
“This writing is in big part a way for me to sort of reconnect with my country and the ways I feel about the country and the people that live there,” he acknowledges. “It’s all a way to sort of go back. I feel very nostalgic about Venezuela all of the time, and my memories of growing up there are so amazing. But I know that that Venezuela no longer exists, and [it] feels like some sort of death. I thankfully didn’t lose my brother, but I lost my country, the place where I would have loved to raise my children or live the rest of my life. It is and will forever be my home.”
Alejandro Puyana will have a book release party at BookPeople on Aug. 20.
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Publish date : 2024-08-14 18:33:00
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